Continuous Integration in the Cloud

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice of frequently integrating developers work and verifying each integration using an automated build and test process. You can find more at Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler.

We are a Ruby on Rails shop and recently we started using tddium, a hosted test and CI service.

Benefits of using a SaaS CI product include:

simple and quick configuration – short time to get CI going

low costs – pay for only what you need

faster test execution – tests run in parallel on multiple instances

Configuration of tddium is very straightforward. There is no need to acquire, setup and maintain a CI server. Providing you have test suites available, a few simple commands described at https://www.tddium.com/support/ is all what is required.

The resultant workflow is outlined below:

Developer commits a code change to github source code repository

Test run is automatically triggered

Upon test completion a notification is sent to developers indicating how many tests have passed and how many failed (if any)

Notification includes a link to a dashboard where test failures can be examined in more details